Let’s make a bet. Open 5 business study books and at least in 3 of them one of the first sentences you’ll see will be: "The three most important things in retailing are – location, location and location". The fact this phrase has become a classic cliche doesn’t take away from the importance of the message it conveys - yes, you guessed it right - pay attention to the location.

Same goes for advertising. Fifty years ago or five days ago, the decision where you’re going to advertise has always been crucial for your set-up. Nowadays, thanks to programmatic advertising, advertisers can really dig into the global map and focus their campaigns with greater location precision. You can drill down into specifics and select countries, states, regions, cities, even neighbourhoods and streets. Geo-targeting is indeed a powerful tool in programmatic advertising and as we’ve mentioned before when used to the fullest it can do wonders with your campaign effectiveness. (You can also read our article “3 Super Tips to Optimize Your Programmatic Advertising" to find out more)

The perfect aid to help way make the most of your geo-targeting comes in the face of Campaign Optimization Engines - robots who enable you to achieve greater precision with your strategies and provide you with valuable insight for your future decisions.

Consider the workload. You’ve build a top notch campaign (or a few campaigns) with clever targeted strategies to engage people across the world. You want to promote your products in USA (New York and Los Angeles), in Europe (London, Paris and Berlin), in Asia (Shanghai, Singapore and Seoul). Using the signature options of programmatic advertising technologies, you have selected the groups of people (taking into account their age, interests, occupation, etc.) you want to target in each of those places. But you have also clarified in each region a different strategy for the different cities - example: one creative for East London and another for West London. And so on, and so on into the specifics.

Without doing the math you can see that the actual number of your strategies is quite the workload. You want to make the most of each of your strategy because each of it is important to your overall campaign. So do you start prioritizing? Do you leave one and then work more on the other? It is in the nature of a robot to be everywhere in the same time. So when you have included a Campaign Optimization Engine in your advertising equation you can be sure that he will operate simultaneously on all of your strategies, exploring each city, each zip code you’ve assigned him to.

See the difference. The robot will help you really understand the effect of your campaign. He can help you see how the people in the different locations (whether they are oceans apart or two blocks away from each other) are reacting to your offer. Thanks to his ability to process vast amount of data simultaneously, he can show you in simple terms how your message has been accepted and where it has achieved the result you’re looking for. But there is something else - things change. What was trendy in New York today may not be the case tomorrow. The robot can sense this type of difference in the behaviour and adjust to it. If there is any shift in the market he will let you know of it.

In this way you can always be prepared and provide the most relevant message to your target audiences wherever they might be. Being able to reach a location-specific audience and offer such timely and personalized content is a game-changing ingredient in the competitive jungle of today’s digital advertising.